Cross stitch pattern of Nezuko from Demon Slayer. Download the PDF and PNG files over at my Patreon.

Grid Size: 76W x 100H
Design Area: 5.29″ x 7.00″ (74 x 98 stitches)
Colors: 16

My Patron, Natacha Bird, is the world’s last Cetus, just hatched and ready to take over where the old one left off. They have big plans to use climate change to churn up some amazingly catastrophic storms once they’ve grown to full size, but in the meantime, Natacha is going to be practicing riptides and blowing over beach umbrellas.

I’m in the minority here, but I just couldn’t get into Demon Slayer the same way I liked similar shows like HunterXHunter, and I’m not really sure why. It’s a good show with a lovable main character, and there’s nothing that egregious like Fire Force where I can point to one thing that ruined it for me, but rather I think shonen battle anime just isn’t my thing. It’s like, I can see the appeal of fighting a bunch of people with cool abilities, but that’s not my favorite part of anime.

And it’s not that I don’t like violence either. I really enjoyed Invincible, and Talentless Nana was fun. It’s not the violence itself that makes me tune out. I think it’s that the plot tends to always happen outside of the battle, where the actual fighting doesn’t really matter much to the story only the outcome.

You know those reality shows where they’re announcing the winner and they stretch it out to like ten minutes of “and the winner is…”? I have zero patience for that, and I get that same feeling with fight scenes. I want to get to the aftermath quickly, find out how the characters feel about their defeat or how they plan on sneaking around while they heal, stuff like that. The fight itself is just boring filler to me even if one guy has a cool fire sword.

I want to hurry up and get to the good part, but for some people the fighting is the good part, and I just don’t get it.

Then there’s a problem that’s more specific to me. I’m not the kind of person who can get attached to a character from their design alone. Demon Slayer has way too many characters and I just cannot care about more than maybe ten of them at once. The first few episodes were pretty good where we were learning about our protagonist and the mystery about how demons work, but then we just got more and more characters and I can’t tell which ones are actually important so I end up not caring about any of them.

I watched the whole first season and I couldn’t tell you any of their names. I guess the spider family was interesting and the boar headed dude was fun, then there’s the butterfly chick and the guy with the nacho yukata, but everyone else is just blends together. They’re introduced, do one thing, then it’s on to the next one off character. It’s tiring to keep up with.

I feel like I have the same problems with most battle anime like My Hero Academia and RWBY, too many characters and too much pointless spectacle fighting.